HAMR time

Seagate Technologies LLC's new HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) technology addresses current concerns about today's perpendicular recording methods for magnetic disk media. According to Mark Kryder, Seagate's chief technology officer and senior vice president of research, current disk media with perpendicular recording could reach its limits in about five years. "HAMR could extend magnetic recording areal density by about a factor of 10 beyond what can be accomplished with perpendicular recording, and has the potential of extending the hard drive technology another six to seven years beyond its five-year limit."

HAMR uses a laser and a magnetic head together to read and write data on new and more stable disk medium such as iron-platinum. The laser heats the disk medium while the magnetic head writes to it, allowing the disk to store more data. After the media cools, the disk and data becomes very stable. Kryder says, "There are a large number of media that can be written by HAMR and iron-platinum materials can theoretically support 50 terabits per square inch."

Difficulties in building production lines that deliver the right chemical balance that can produce carbon nanotubes are another concern. IBM's Thomas Theis finds these particularly vexing. "You have to learn how to purify the chemical mixes because if you do not get the right balance, you end up with a mix of metal and semiconductor carbon nanotubes," says Theis.

However, Colossal Storage's Thomas firmly believes that some of these technologies could be in production as soon as two or three years from now if the right market drivers were in place. But at the current pace, the soonest any of his projects will even reach the laboratory stage is in 2010, with production starting no sooner than 2012.